Not a Fairytale
by LilaMae1
Summary: It wasn't a fairytale, but maybe it didn't have to be. My version of Rachel and Shelby's story.
1. Chapter 1

First Glee story! I was kind of disappointed with how the Rachel/Shelby plotline was handled, and this story has been running through my head constantly. It was irritating me immensely, so I decided to splurge it out here.

Disclaimer: Clearly I don't own it.

Once upon a time, there were two men who were very much in love, and they wanted a baby very badly. They couldn't have one by themselves, and for some years, they tried very hard to adopt a baby. When this failed, and they had lost all hope, they met a very kind young woman who said that she would help them. To their great delight, the kind young woman became pregnant with a beautiful baby girl. When the baby girl was born, her daddies took her into their arms and knew that she was everything they had ever hoped for. The kind young woman smiled at the baby girl and her daddies, and said that although she was leaving her precious baby girl to be raised by her fathers, she would always love her little daughter from afar. The End.

That's what my dads used to tell me. It was my favourite bedtime story. I first heard it when I was four. My daddy had taken me to the playground, and while he chatted to some of the other parents on the bench, I wandered over to the sandbox. There was another little girl, playing with a chipped teacup, playing tea parties. I sat next to her, and we played amiably for a while. After a while, she started looking at me weirdly.

"Why is your daddy here with you instead of your mommy?"

I started slightly. I hadn't played so much with other children. I spent a lot of time around adults, and since they all knew about my birth, naturally they didn't ask about my mother in front of me. So when this ponytailed little girl asked me why my mommy wasn't there, I didn't know. I'd always known other people had mothers and I didn't, but I suppose it had never occurred to me to ask my fathers where *my* mother was. So that was how the story came about. A sweet fairytale for a four year old child, the details skipped out.

I believed that that was the whole story for years. In my ignorance, I thought that my mother really had just borne me for my fathers, no payoff, just out of kindness. When I was six, and fully into my fantasy stage, I recreated the story for myself. This time, my mother was secretly a Queen of a faraway kingdom. There was a great war in the Queen's kingdom, and although she needed an heir, the land was too dangerous for the baby. Fearing for her child, she came to America, and decided to have her child and give her to two kindly men to raise for her. When the little girl was all grown up, and the Great War was over, the Queen would come back, and the little girl would become a princess. Her daddies would live at the castle too, and they would all love each other very much and live happily ever after.

When I got a bit older, I realised that this was kind of stupid, but it was always in the back of my mind. As my love of musical theatre grew with me, my fantasies of love, drama, and great peril grew too. By the age of 11, my daydreams of my mother involved a woman who was a cross between Patti LuPone, Xena Warrior Princess and Grace Kelly.

It was when I was 12 that I first knew about the money aspect of surrogacy. The mother of the girl sitting next to me in class volunteered in the school, and must have mentioned to her daughter that I had two gay dads.

"Rachel? You know how you have two dads? Where's your mom?"

I was kind of used to these questions by now, so I answered her as I drew my diagram. "Oh, my mom was a surrogate. She had me for my dads."

"Whoa," said the girl, eyes wide with that particular preteen love of drama. "I've never met anyone who was born by a surrogate before. Your dads must be really rich."

I was confused by that last bit, and stupidly asked her what she meant. "What do you mean they must be really rich?"

"My Auntie Sylvia adopted a little boy, but she looked into surrogacy first. Surrogate babies cost, like, $20000 each."

That night, I asked my dads to tell me straight, and to give them credit, they did. They paid my surrogate mother $16000 to have me, then got her to sign a contract saying she'd never contact me, at least not until I turned 18. They paid her the money, she signed the contract, and they hadn't seen her since. I couldn't sleep that night. I guess it's hard to have your childhood dreams shattered. My mother was have been a kind woman, and maybe the money wasn't the reason she did it, but it was pretty clear then that she saw me as someone else's child. That she wasn't coming back for me. I remember being pretty devastated at the time.

It got easier. I had my dads, I had school, my numerous extra-curricular activities. She was always there, though. I'd wonder if she looked like me, and if I watched a new movie, I'd wonder if it was the kind of movie she liked to watch. Going around town, I watched how mothers interacted with their little daughters, wondering if my mom would have chided me like that, or if her hugs would have picked me up off the floor. My mom wasn't there, though, and even if she lived somewhere between my conscious and subconscious, I had decided I was okay.

My life was never perfect, but it remained "okay", without my mother in my life. Until Jesse St. James showed up.


	2. Chapter 2

A big thank you to all my lovely reviewers- Starophonie, Hollie, DarkestAngel, Kizzy, GGabz, and TwilightEquestrian. I'm glad you all liked it!

This chapter takes us up to Theatricality, where Rachel finds out Shelby is her mother, and is more of a filler chapter. After this, we're going to skip pretty quickly to the end of the summer and the new school year. The next chap will assume you've watched the Glee season 1 finale.

Disclaimer: I don't own Glee.

After Jesse had come and gone, I was in shock. He was so perfect. Well, no, he wasn't. He was arrogant, harsh, and went around McKinley with a disdaining look on his face. I suppose it had been par for the course, refusing to notice these things because it seemed like he was perfect for _me_. Finn had been kind, up until the horrible ending of our relationship, but Jesse was the man I had dreamed of ever since I was a little girl. An excellent singer, a good actor, handsome. In other words, he had a destiny on Broadway.

I'd kind of always known that our relationship was slightly strange, though. Like Finn said, he was the main lead of our competition. It was nice to believe that he transferred over to McKinley just for me, but it always struck me as a bit odd. As soon as the others mentioned this, however, my brain clammed up because I was just so angry over their accusations and their attempts to have me thrown out of the club. Then, of course, was his obsession over "helping" me find my mother, although it was more "forced" in the end. I was even more confused over that one.

Thankfully, (or not thankfully) that particular mystery got cleared up fairly quickly. Mercedes, Quinn and I sneaked in and went to sit up in the gods of the Carmel High auditorium. We weren't supposed to be there. Mr. Schuester would probably have stopped us had he known, but none of us were stupid enough to tell him. I had been surprised to find myself with Quinn and Mercedes in our little recon mission. Mercedes was a fellow diva, and even if we had a reasonably decent rapport, we were always going to be competing for solos. As for Quinn, the girl who had bullied me since I was fourteen, it was a miracle we could sit next to each other without violence involved. I shook myself out of thinking this way and concentrated on the task ahead.

"If they catch us, does that mean we have to go to jail?" whispered Quinn.

I rolled my eyes slightly. She needed to read up on copyright. "Stealing their ideas is not a crime."

After a couple more whispered mutterings, we settled to watch their show. They were indeed doing Lady Gaga, and I felt a small shot of pride in my spying skills. If my Broadway dreams didn't come to fruition, I had always thought being a spy would be quite an intriguing job. My obsessive need to win against my competition would probably be an asset. They were all there, cloaked in Lady Gaga outfits. Jesse was there too, although I never realised at the time, his face being hooded. What caught my attention was the woman talking to them, their coach, Shelby Corcoran.

"Ok, ok, ok, just...enough. You guys aren't getting it. You're letting the costumes do all the work. Theatricality isn't about crazy outfits! It's not enough to douse yourselves with gasoline, you have to light yourselves on fire to make it work!"

"God, she's good", I said with wonder. I kind of wished Mr Schue was like this. Dramatic, and not restraining herself.

She decided to demonstrate. Funny Girl, E flat. Exactly what I would have done, as I told Quinn and Mercedes.

As she began to sing, I felt my heart stop. It was the voice. The voice from the tape. I don't know now how I could have been so sure, but at that moment I just knew. Her looks, her voice, her dramatic tendencies, it just had to be her. I found myself moving towards the stage as she kept singing, in one of the most beautiful mezzo-soprano voices I had ever heard. It wasn't voluntary, but I couldn't stop myself as I spoke up at the end of her song.

"Miss Corcoran? My name's Rachel Berry. I'm your daughter."

I could hear the gasps of shock surrounding me. It isn't something you hear every day, the lead singer of your competition turning out to be your coach's long-lost daughter. I was still staring at her, when she made a motion to her students, and they began to file out. Finally, we were left alone together. I had imagined this moment a thousand times, and it had always involved singing, but not sitting in the empty auditorium afterwards, rows apart.

"Did you ever regret it?" I asked her suddenly.

"Yes...then no...then so much," she told me, her words stilted and clearly heartfelt. I didn't know what to do with that. There were so many things about that statement.

"When did you realise it was the right time for me to find you?"

"I saw you sing at Sectionals. You were extraordinary. You were me."

We had some small chat after that. Then I told her about my dads, and the glass of water they always brought me when I was upset. That was a mistake. She just looked at me, and it was obvious that she was regretting even meeting me.

"I am so sorry, Rachel... I'll call you." My heart sunk when she said that. It was pretty evident she had no intention of doing so, except maybe out of pity. I sat there, all alone, and wondered what I had done to deserve being abandoned by my own mother.


End file.
